Pronounced: luh-JER-uh-tee, noun
Notes: I know many people that this word describes
Yesterday’s word
The word punchinello means “a grotesque or absurd person”
Background / Comments
As you might have guessed, this comes from the Italian (specifically, the Naples dialect) word polecenella (a short, fat buffoon, a principal character in Italian puppet shows). This word is a diminutive of pollecena (turkey pullet), and this word comes the the Latin pullus (young chicken). Our word was chosen due to the resemblance of punchinello’s nose to a turkey’s beak.
First usage
This word came into English in the mid-1600s
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 